Traditional market research does not facilitate obtaining information as to the desired configuration of a product and the price a person will pay for the product as a tradeoff for the preferred configuration. For example, it is difficult, for a fast food company to test the market as to best combinations of items in a meal at a price the consumer finds acceptable, until that meal is actually offered. Today, the Internet provides the ability to conduct research to multiple potential respondents, such as by polling or surveys. For example, such surveys are conducted over the Internet by Harris Interactive Inc. of Rochester, N.Y. However, such surveys on computers are primarily in question and answer formats and do not provide the ability of the consumer to configure a preferred product from among features, such as a meal, car, phone service, or any product having multiple features and available attributes, levels, or quantities for such features.
Although web sites on the Internet can enable a customer to on-line configure particular types of products, such as a computer, such web sites are directed to sales of products, and not for market research in testing preferences of consumers in the configuration of products. An example of such a web site to purchase a computer is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,167,383. The consumer is merely provided with a check off list of the features available, and is not provided with an updated price in real-time as such features are selected or changed, unless the effect of price of each feature is provided to the consumer and the consumer off-line calculates the product with such features. It is only after the configured product is submitted to a web site that the consumer can review the price of the product prior to selecting payment options. Moreover, no information is provided to the web site as to the time it took for the consumer to make their decisions involving the configured product, the steps the consumer took in making tradeoffs for desired attributes about the product at an acceptable price, or follow-up questions regarding how or why the consumer made their decisions.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,124,911, issued Jun. 23, 1992, describes a method of evaluating consumer choice through concept testing for the marketing and development of consumer product. The method elicits consumer evaluations as to attributes of a product and the likelihood of purchasing multiple products, and then performs independent factor analysis on the elicited responses to provide likelihood of purchasing each product. U.S. Pat. No. 6,012,051, issued Jan. 4, 2000, describes a consumer profiling system with analytic decision processor. The system can obtain over the Internet a user's computer preferences and requirements for products, and builds a user profile to assist the user in making decisions. Neither of these two patents enables the consumer to configure the features of a product at a computer over a network to provide information about the manner and time to arrive at a final configured product.